New Hire Onboarding Eng

# New Hire Onboarding — Backend Engineer

## When this skill fires

- New eng's start date is approaching (T-7 days)
- New eng's start date arrives
- An engineer is being asked "how do we onboard?"

## Pre-arrival checklist (T-7 to T-0)

- [ ] Laptop provisioned + shipped
- [ ] GitHub Org invite sent (engineering team)
- [ ] Slack workspace invite (auto-add to: #eng, #incidents read-only, #releases, team-specific)
- [ ] Vault access (1Password) — read-only on shared vaults, write on personal
- [ ] AWS dev role provisioned (no prod access for first 30 days)
- [ ] PagerDuty: shadow-only on the team rotation for first 90 days
- [ ] Calendar invite for week-1 pairing slots created (see schedule below)

## Week 1 pairing schedule (default for backend hires)

| Day | Pair | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Mon | @deepak | API codebase tour — request → handler → db |
| Tue | @maya | RDS + Redis architecture, common queries |
| Wed | @sam | AWS infra, deployment, on-call basics |
| Thu | (whoever) | Codereview shadow — read 5 PRs, comment on 1 |
| Fri | (themselves) | **Ship a tiny PR.** This is non-negotiable. |

> *@hr-rachel: "every new eng ships a real PR by end of week 1. tiny + low-risk, but real. it does more for ramp than 2 weeks of docs."*

## The "first PR" rule

The first PR can be:
- A missing test
- A small bug fix from the public issue tracker
- A rename / refactor flagged in TODOs
- An index / config tweak (Alex Park added an index to `shipments.created_at` on day 4 — perfect example)

It cannot be:
- A new feature (too risky)
- A refactor of a hot path
- Anything touching infra config

## Weeks 2–4 ramp

- **Week 2:** Take a real Linear ticket, pair-coded
- **Week 3:** Take a real Linear ticket solo, with codereview from anyone
- **Week 4:** First on-call shadow shift (shadow the primary, don't get paged directly)

## Post-90-day check-in

- Promote off paging shadow → primary rotation
- AWS prod access provisioned (read-only first, then write after 30 more days)
- Quarterly review cycle starts

## Anti-patterns we've seen

- Front-loading 2 weeks of docs reading → ramp slower, retention worse
- Skipping the first-PR rule "because they're senior" → stalls on day 5
- Paging direct in week 1 → demoralizing if they can't help

## Source

Extracted from `#onboarding` thread on **2026-03-04**, validated against **Alex Park's actual 2026-03-10 → 2026-03-15 ramp** (shipped first PR on day 4, currently a productive contributor).

## See also

- [[companies/acme-logistics]] — tenant context
- [[people/deepak]] — primary owner; backend-lead pairing
- [[people/rachel]] — HR co-owner
- [[skills/db-connection-pool-exhausted.skill]] — first-PR shadow material
- [[skills/slow-api-bad-deploy.skill]] — first-paged-shadow scenario
- [[skills/new-hire-onboarding-cx.skill]] — sibling onboarding pattern